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New WiFi Link Distance Record
Espectr0 writes "A Venezuelan professor along with his team have set a new record for the longest WiFi link. Using commodity hardware, they established a connection between a PC in El Águila, Venezuela, and one in Platillón Mountain, a distance of about 237 miles. The previous record was 193 miles. Slides [PDF] are also available."
I almost get a usable signal in my bedroom which is 237 decimeters away from my access point in my basement. Oh... the article claims 237 miles. My "of the shelf" equipment must have come from the clearance shelf.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
The Line of Sight caveat is a rather significant point ommitted from the summary. This is still quite an achievement.
Good for them. But since WiFi is line of sight, the only way they can do this is by using mountainous regions. I guess us flatlanders will have to resort to bouncing our signals off of blimps or flying pigs (coated in foil, of course).
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
One of my ex-housemates was a Sonar tech in the Navy. The Sonar and Radar guys apparently hang out together on those ships and one of their favorite games was to paint the guys coming up the desk with an armload of flourescent tubes with the radar, illuminating the lamps. Hilarity ensues. They never killed anyone doing it. But at close range and high power, I'm told you can throw hot dogs up into the path of the radar and they come down cooked.
Moral of the story is that it's directional and as long as you don't stand in front of it there's not likely to be any significant effect. At the other end, the signal has been scattered substantially and it's only coming in at a whisper of the original signal.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Using a directed wireless transmission is certainly far cheaper in such remote regions. Think of the equivalent cost of building and maintaining 250 miles of land line!
The article is from Wired. I'll let you figure it out from there.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Just wait until the FCC hears about this! These guys are in big, big trouble.
A friend of mine who's a military history buff told me a story about Soviet fighter aircraft in the 70s and 80s. Seems they had very powerful look-down, shoot-down radars and pilots were instructed to turn them off during take off and landing. Apparently sometimes they forgot, and runway maintenance crews had to regularly pick up the carcasses of rabbits, birds and other unlucky critters that were in the area when those MiGs went on missions.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
In other news...
Cuban government officials have begun a new, lucrative service where they have established a WiFi base and are charging $10/day to residents of southern Florida for unfettered Internet access. "We have very good download rates for Sicko and, of course, for all your favorite music artists," Castro's spokesperson is quoted as saying. In the background this reporter could hear maniacal laughter and intermittent shouts of "See what the RIAA thinks of that!" and other such obscenities.
Joke's on you.
;)
Hot dogs are already cooked when you buy them
and a parabolic, and various amplifiers... and this:
They never said how they accomplished that, but it was presumably done by hacking the firmware to change the collision detection and the back-off settings.
No.
We thank you for your interest.
1) Keep my bluetooth headset connected to its base station an amazingly 3 feet away
2) Keep my cellphone connected with a tower a mere 1 mile away. 3) Put Humpty Dumpty together again.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
The technology is straightforward. They had line of sight, used 1 meter dishes at each end, and aligned them with telescopes. Point to point microwave links have been doing that since the 1950s. After all, you can get a signal to and from geosync orbit with a dish of that size.
The most interesting thing about this is that they found two points on the earth's surface 273 miles apart with a clear line of sight between them.
They are not making any innovation in RF, but they are testing a new experimental MAC protocol from Berkeley that provides higher throughput for long-distance point-to-point links.
Neither, if you read the PDF about the experiment, you'll see the aim is to discover whether stock equipment can be used to connect remote areas to the Internet. Connecting people in rural locations is a challenge being faced in many countries, others have different solutions.
Really, I consider myself a bit of a leftie and I'd like to see Mugabe slung out of power as much as any Tory would. Comparing Mugabe to the liberal left is like comparing Karl Marx with Ronald McDonald: pointless and stupid.
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
(as /me ducks and runzlakhell...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
A colleague of mine was a submariner who had this story. They were down for an extended dive, and when they surfaced, they would send a short, dense burst of communications and data on a very powerful microwave uplink - get up, send fast, get back down. It was a very powerful signal - and they would surface to a depth that would get the periscope and the antenna above water, do a quick scan for surface vessels, send the burst and dive. One day they did this and saw thru the periscope there was a gull on the antenna mast. So they would dive to submerge the antenna, the bird should fly away. They resurfaced, and the bird perched on the antenna. They did it again. Bird comes back. Third time. Fourth. Can't shake the bird. Finally the OD tells them "punch it" and send the microwave burst signal. He said the bird just keeled over and dropped into the water.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
is like comparing Karl Marx with Ronald McDonald
Wait, wait, I think I know this one: one published in Hamburg and the other punished the Hamburgler? Was that it?
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
3Mbps with the TIER equipment sustained in both directions 0% packet loss shown in the 'ping' output.
The Linksys (WRT54G) equipment that had 65kbps sustained in both directions had 1% packet loss over 58 packets (one lost packet).
In all, they both were sustained and stable connections, but the TIER hardware was a far better connection in terms of speed than the Linksys hardware.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
As one of the crew that ran the Wifi Shootout in Vegas a couple of years ago, I can say that there won't be another Defcon Wi-Fi Shootout any time soon. We simply ran out of Line-of-Sight locations. I'll tell you right now that the iFiber Redwire team could have established that link were they to have the LoS.
I just wanted to point out that I use Linux because I like Linux. I wonder if it's possible for people in general to prefer X solely for the properties of X, instead of how it is related to Y.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
(IANAL)
1) Keep my bluetooth headset connected to its base station an amazingly 3 feet away
2) Keep my cellphone connected with a tower a mere 1 mile away. 3) Put Humpty Dumpty together again. 4) ???
5) Profit!
A friend of mine who's a military history buff told me a story about Soviet fighter aircraft in the 70s and 80s. Seems they had very powerful look-down, shoot-down radars and pilots were instructed to turn them off during take off and landing. Apparently sometimes they forgot, and runway maintenance crews had to regularly pick up the carcasses of rabbits, birds and other unlucky critters that were in the area when those MiGs went on missions.
That's what we engineers would call "complete cobblers". The power intensity required to cook anything is remarkably high, and requires some time - your microwave oven takes some minutes before the "ding". Also, the frequency at which a microwave oven cooks is chosen because it resonates water molecules. The last thing you want is radar that can't "see" through clouds!
let me also share this record (announced also 24 may in in this Italian newspaper): the Ixem team of "Politecnico" in Torino has set up a 20megabit connection from "Capanna Margherita" (Mount Blanc, 4556m of altitude) with "Pian Cavallaro" (a point on the mountain range that divides Tuscany from Emilia-Romagna); the two points were 295km apart; the hw used was a 386 CPU running Linux; the network is Hiperlan type 2 and Wi-Max 802.16 (EIRP regulatory requirements limited to 30 dBm is satisfied). They have also set a webcam in Capanna Margherita, that is accessed thru the link